Raveled Sleeve
by etraytin
Summary: Five times Donna helped Josh get to sleep, and one time she did not.


Raveled Sleeve, or Five Times Donna Helped Josh Get to Sleep, and One Time She Did Not

(Author's Note: This is another prompt fic, this one not from Tumblr, but from someone who's been following my other stories here. The prompt was for a fic where Donna takes care of Josh on the Santos campaign trail in the same way she's taken care of him before, but now everything is different.)

I. February 1998, somewhere in the Carolinas

It was already well past two in the morning when the bus stopped for gas, with the announcement that they were still three hours drive from Charleston. This was met with agonized groans from most of the staffers, who were facing a very full day on what would be very little sleep. His new assistant Donna, Josh noted, was not among them. She'd curled up and fallen asleep in her seat hours ago with a briefing book for a pillow, and had only roused herself for the stop. Long arms and legs on her, he couldn't help but notice, and it was hard to figure out how she could make herself so comfortable. As the bus began rolling and the lights dimmed again, she looked over at him. "You ought to sleep."

He grimaced. "Too much noise. The guys are playing cards, and Toby's trying to do that damned speech. It's all inside my head." He needed the sleep badly, his eyes were drooping even as he spoke, but every time Ed or Larry made a bet, Josh twitched.

Donna frowned. "Let's see what we can do." She unfolded herself like like a magic trick and reached into her capacious purse, pulling out a pack of tissues. With a bit of tearing and some deft twists, she fashioned a pair of makeshift earplugs for him. Josh suspected he looked ridiculous, but he didn't care. He fell asleep in the quiet, wondering whether maybe she'd be able to hack the campaign trail after all.

II. October 1998, Austin TX

He had been up for three straight days, he was pretty sure of that fact, if nothing else. Hoynes had been supposed to deliver the South for them, but he was barely even bringing in the votes from Texas, if the current polling could be believed. With just over three weeks to the election, Josh believed every poll with the sick certainty of a conspiracy theorist waiting for the microwaves to hit his brain. With Hoynes completely useless in his own home state, the Governor had come down for one last big push for those 34 crucial electoral votes, and instead wound up making stupid jokes about cowboy hats and generally making everything ten times worse. Electoral maps danced behind Josh's eyes, all of them growing redder by the day.

To put the icing on the cake, he'd been banished from Campaign HQ an hour ago, sent to his room like a small child after one too many shouting matches with Toby over demographic targeting. Apparently certain naive people believed that he would be able to get some sleep if he were someplace dark and quiet for awhile. That strategy might have worked if his room weren't right next to the elevator, or if the walls and floors hadn't been paper-thin. He put a pillow over his head, but it didn't do enough to drown out the noise or calm his racing mind. The knock on his door was a relief, if only because it promised the prospect of someone to yell at.

Unfortunately for him, Donna was well-aware of his tricks by now and merely shouldered past him the moment he opened the door, dragging a large shopping bag and a big boxy something. He blinked stupidly at her. "So are you moving in now? Margaret's finally had enough of the incessant state trivia?"

She dropped the bag on his desk and pointed to the bed, using short words he'd be sure to understand. "You. Bed. Now."

"Well, it's not the most romantic proposition I've gotten-" Josh began, but was quelled by a particularly deadly glare from his assistant. He sat down on the bed and watched as she set up the box, actually a large box fan, near the door and turned it on, then plugged in a little radio-looking thing on the bedside table. "What is this?"

"You need to sleep," she told him. "If you never sleep, I never sleep, and I might have to kill you. I'm saving both our lives." She flipped a switch, and the radio thing began making rainfall noises. Between it and the whir of the fan, the room was pretty much filled with noise.

"You made it louder in here, Donna," he pointed out.

"It's not the volume that bothers you," she pointed out. "It's sudden noise, footsteps, voices, doors. You won't hear them now. Lay down." She all but pushed him into laying prone, her hands surprisingly gentle for someone ostensibly so annoyed with him. She smelled nice too, he noticed, sort of flowery and sweet and warm. "Now sleep," she told him, yawning herself. "You're not on call again till eight-thirty tomorrow, so don't even think about setting a wakeup call." Donna left, but her scent lingered, and that plus the soothing white noise of rain and wind carried him into unconsciousness.

III. August 2000, George Washington Hospital

Josh flinched when a door shut loudly outside, then winced at the pain flinching caused. He wasn't entirely sure where he was, but he was in bed and nothing felt very good. There was something heavy on his chest, something he couldn't see when he slitted his eyes open, but that made it hard to catch his breath, made his chest burn and ache. His head was simultaneously floating and pounding, and he was possibly more tired than he'd ever been, though he thought he might have been asleep just a few minutes ago. He smelled antiseptics and ozone, bad unpleasant smells, but also a hint of flower-warm-sweet under all that. "Donna?" he murmured, opening his eyes a little wider.

A hand squeezed his fingers, one he hadn't even noticed was there till just now. "Hey," she murmured back to him, her voice sounding raspy and sleepy. "You're not supposed to be awake yet."

"Hurts," he muttered, lips curving down in a pout. "Loud noises." A cart rattled past outside as though to underline his point.

"Yeah," she agreed, and he could feel her thumb rubbing soft circles over the back of his hand. It was the only thing that felt good. "They won't let you have a noise machine in here, too much equipment already. Just close your eyes, okay?" He didn't honestly have much choice about that, but he could feel her scoot closer, smell her scent more strongly as she rested her cheek against the rail of his bed. She began to sing softly in his ear, some song he vaguely recognized about cowboys and babies or something. It was nice, and he was sure he could tease her about it later because Donna wouldn't even sing karaoke, but he probably wouldn't. He sank back into the dark, her lullaby following him down.

IV: September 2002, Air Force One

Josh was twitching. He didn't really know when that had started, but it was probably somewhere after the sixth cup of coffee. Donna had been too busy aggregating polling data to cut him off, and he'd really stopped counting, but he was pretty sure now that it had been too much. There was a nauseous burn in the back of his throat, and he suspected he might actually be sweating excess caffeine. The lights of the plane were dim, most of the passengers asleep given their 11pm takeoff time, but he'd just loosened his tie and carried on. There was no way he was going to let Governor Ritchie sneak ahead and take this election away from them, not after how hard they'd worked, not with the kind of buffoon they'd be turning the country over to. On the other side of the cabin, Toby and Sam argued over the same stump speech they'd been arguing over for months, one of them occasionally raising their voice or tapping the table to emphasize a point.

Donna found him in his darkened corner, stretched out on a couch in a parody of relaxation as he read through yet another briefing book. "You need to sleep," she reminded him, the litany more than a little well-worn by now.

He looked up at her, blinking with eyelids that felt like coarse-grain sandpaper. "And yet," he observed. His leg was still twitching. He made a conscious effort to stop it.

She sighed. "Scootch over," she told him, giving him a light push on the top of his head, not down by his feet where normal people would try to share space on an already-tenanted couch. With little grace and some muttering, he sat up, letting her sit down next to him with her pile of polling data. "Okay," she said, "lay down." He gave her the 'you're sitting on my couch' look, and she responded with the 'you are too hopeless to be let out unsupervised' look. "Come on," she repeated, patting her leg. "Nobody's gonna see or care. They'd give me a mallet if they thought it would make you get some actual sleep."

Josh gave her another dubious look, but settled back down, this time with his head pillowed on her thigh. She smelled nice, she always smelled nice, but somewhere along the line she'd changed her perfume, something less flowery and more citrus. His sleepily fatuous brain decided she smelled like sunshine. Yards away, Toby and Sam began arguing again, and he groaned. Donna laughed at him, then reached down and put a cupped hand gently over his ear, blocking out the noises. He could almost hear the ocean, like a seashell, but what he mostly heard was the rush of his own heart beating and blessed quiet. He closed his eyes.

V: September 2006, Somewhere in the Carolinas

The DNC had promised them a plane, Josh reminded himself as he paced along the center corridor of the bus, past sleeping staffers and talking staffers and game-playing staffers, and no staffers who seemed to actually be doing the work that he was paying them far too much of the campaign's limited resources to do. But soon they would have a plane, he reminded himself, and that would be good because he could goddamn well jump out of it if he had to keep dealing with this kind of incompetence! His steps got faster as he went up and down the aisle again and again, till he was close to running, and he could feel the eyes of people starting to watch him go.

"Sit down, Josh." A hand intercepted him, locked onto his arm as he tried to finish his back-of-the-bus portion of the circuit. He looked and saw Donna, who he'd been deliberately trying not to look at all day, really all week since Lou had hired her onto the campaign. She was too different now, different clothes, different haircut, different in the way she held her body, moved her face and hands. He remembered how she used to be, with five outfits that she mixed and matched everyday, with her hair pulled back into a bun or worn loose and shining, not this carefully styled construction with sharp bangs framing her eyes. Looking at her made him think that maybe all those old familiar Donna things were things she did because she had to, for want of money or time or both, and not things she wanted to be. Made him wonder if all the times they'd had together were things she did because she had to, because he was her boss, and not for any deeper, real reasons. Even considering the idea was painful, so it was easier just not to. Harder when she was right here and hanging onto his arm.

"You gonna open up a window?" he quipped weakly, raising his eyebrows at her. That drew a reluctant half-smile from her, but didn't earn him release. The back of the bus had a semi-circular seating area around a small table, where she'd obviously been working on a laptop. She pushed him into the seat next to her and closed her laptop. "Don't close that," he objected, "you're the only one getting anything done."

"You need to sleep," she told him firmly.

He raised both hands. "No, no, no, nope, no," he told her, shaking his head. "We're not starting with this again. You're the one who said you were tired of babysitting me, right? That kind of means you have to not babysit me anymore. That's not your job."

"That was never my job," she murmured, and he could've sworn she looked hurt at his words. Miffed, he decided. She was miffed that he wasn't taking her advice. "But you've been awake too long, and you're drinking too much coffee, and your little aisle sprint is probably the only jogging you've done all year, right?"

"I don't sleep on buses," he told her, folding his arms across his chest. "Anyway, sleep is for the weak. Talk to me again about sleeping after November."

"Sure, because I imagine you'll get a lot of sleep during transition." Her voice trailed off as the bus pulled to one side for a moment, allowing an ambulance to pass in the left lane, siren wailing. Josh tried to disguise his own flinch, but one look at her face told him he'd been unsuccessful. She reached down and dug into her briefcase, pulling out a little iPod so shiny and new, she'd probably just taken it out of the box. She passed it over to him, draping the earbuds over his hand. "This has music and stuff, just use it, okay? Get some sleep."

Josh stared at the little machine for a moment, then glanced up at Donna again. He had so little clue what she was thinking anymore. But the fact that she was sitting here and trying to take care of him, for whatever reason, was embarrassing and gratifying all at once. He put in the earbuds and pressed the center button. Donna's voice was suddenly in his ears, talking about an upcoming campaign event from two weeks ago in her calmest press-spokesperson voice. "This is your voice," he said aloud, pulling one earbud out. "You listen to yourself on this thing?"

Donna immediately blushed and reached for the iPod. "I recorded some of my press conferences ahead of time, okay? Just to get an idea of how I sounded. That's not what you're supposed to be listening to, there's music on there."

He pulled the device away from her, shielding it behind one hand. "It's fine," he told her, I know how to work one of these." He pretended to fuss with the buttons, but in reality he just let it play on, putting the earbud back into his ear and letting Donna's voice lull him to sleep.

VI. July 2009, Washington DC

Being asleep felt so incredibly good that Josh's only thought upon waking was that he must return to sleep as soon as humanly possible. He put his pillow over his head to block the intrusive noise and closed his eyes, already sliding back down into the delicious dreamless slumber of total exhaustion. Having the pillow removed was a rude awakening, literally. He groaned piteously, but even this earned him absolutely no sympathy from his tormentor.

"It's your turn, Joshua." He cracked one reluctant eye open to see Donna, her hair wildly mussed and her pajamas wrinkled, with bags under her eyes that probably rivaled his own. She was glaring by turns at him and the innocuous white handheld radio on the bedside table, which was whimpering the way Josh sort of felt like doing. "I was up with her an hour ago, she's probably just wet. You fix it." She flopped back onto the bed and closed her eyes.

He groaned again, but sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. "You know," he remarked, "there was a time in my life when you worked very hard to ensure I got enough sleep. What happened to that?"

She replied without opening her eyes. "There was a time in your life when you slept like a hunted animal on the alert for predators, and actually heard noises and stuff. What happened to that?"

"Maybe I just find your presence soporific," he offered, and accepted the face she made as his due. Dropping a kiss on her forehead, he left the bedroom in search of somebody else who needed to get some sleep.


End file.
